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UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

August 29, 2015

Tracy Claeys

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Q. Are these the fastest receivers that you've ever seen on a college field?
TRACY CLAEYS: I don't know. They run well, but we played with them last year, and I felt like we run with them fine. I mean, everybody -- the trend in football now is to get -- put faster guys at the receiver and have two or three, four of them on the field at the same time. But obviously they run as well as anybody does.

Q. Tracy, football is just an emotional game, especially defensively. Are you almost counting on the home crowd to help carry you maybe even to a higher level? How do you look at that?
TRACY CLAEYS: Well, because you've got to be able to win at home and on the road. Obviously we'll get some energy off the home crowd, but we've got to play well, play high energy against good teams, and if you don't they're capable of scoring 70 in a hurry. We're going to have to play fast, tackle well, not give up a lot of yards after the catch, and keep the ball in front of us. If we do that, we'll have an opportunity to win. But the first game not having any game before this, the scariest thing is you've got to come out of the gate ready to go with no rehearsal.

Q. Is that a big advantage for you having played them last year and having played against that offense?
TRACY CLAEYS: Well, we have more film. Last year we didn't have any film, so at least this year we have more film, so it's been easier to prepare for for what we've seen. I'm sure they've thrown in some curve balls and changes from the last season, but yeah, it's been a lot easier to prepare for as far as we have video to work with.

Q. Do you expect it to change much?
TRACY CLAEYS: People who believe in that system don't. They just believe they're better than you and you have they have better athletes than you and they toss the ball around and let their athletes make plays. But they're also one of the best trick teams you'll play in the country. You watch through the season they have some incredible trick plays, and so that'll be the fireworks for the evening to see what type of trick plays they come up with.

Q. Tracy, we had talked earlier about the battle at linebacker, especially with Everett and Cody. Are you feeling pretty comfortable at this point where that has all shaken out?
TRACY CLAEYS: Yeah, yeah, I think we're pretty much set with where we're at. I tell the kids, some guys won't get as many reps this game because it's just a different type of game as if you played Iowa or somebody who did a lot more running game than what they do. They make it hard for you to put a bunch of big bodies on the field at one time, so you know, we've set the roles and defined the roles with the information we have at this time and who we're playing, and so it's time to play, and if we're wrong, we'll change them and go about it, our business. But hopefully we'll right.

Q. So it sounds like there might be more nickel than usual?
TRACY CLAEYS: Yeah, everybody does -- we did it last year. I don't know if we played hardly any base snaps against them a year ago. You've got to match speed with speed. That's all there is to it.

Q. Do you have more speed than you've ever had to match against their speed?
TRACY CLAEYS: Well, same guys as last year, yeah, like who played. We ran with them a year ago. A couple of the fades we were right there and their receivers made great catches, and you're going to lose a jump ball every now and then. You go through all the film and they didn't outrun us. We recruit speed, and we've made -- we've been very open about that. When we recruit, we recruit kids who can run, even if we have to give up a little bit of size. I think the fortunate thing is right now we have a group in the secondary not only do they have the speed but they also have some size, too, and for some of their bigger receivers who can run. I think we match up awfully well with them.

Q. What's the pride factor in terms of your secondary? How do you measure that in terms of --
TRACY CLAEYS: You know, I always expect the worst when I prepare for things, or I should say it this way: I prepare for the worst possible thing to happen but I expect the best to happen. You know, and our kids, like I say, we felt good -- even though we gave up 30 -- we felt good about the way we defended them 80 percent of the time a year ago.

The other 20 percent I think we can improve on because we have video to improve on. We didn't know what type of two-back running game they had a year ago at all. We played all one-back stuff. And so they hurt us in the two-back running game last year a little bit.

The hardest adjustment for us is the Big 12 goes faster than anybody. That's just the truth. Any of the no-huddle offenses, when we played Texas Tech and the Big 12 goes faster than anybody. So it's still going to take a couple series. It doesn't matter what we do in practice -- hell, we've had three managers running balls to the line of scrimmage as fast as they can after a play is over trying to get the balls snapped as fast as we can, but until you play in a game it's going to take a couple series to adjust to that because the Big 12 is awfully fast.

Q. What would you say your secondary's best attribute is?
TRACY CLAEYS: Pick and run, run and cover. This is all -- just like we play any spread team, it's going to be how well you tackle. We can cover them, but if you don't tackle them in space, all of a sudden one missed tackle that backs 15 yards, 18 yards and they make their way down the field. It'll all come down to how we tackle. It won't be whether we're athletic enough to cover them. That won't be the story.

Q. How much do you have to balance hype?
TRACY CLAEYS: You have to do it all the time. There's a process you go through every week. People don't like you saying it, but it is. It's just one more game, and you've got to go through each day and prepare and play the best you can play. If you try to skip right to game day and just say, let's go play, you're going to get your butt beat. We just preach, hey, one day at a time and make sure you're prepared and ready to play, and when the game gets here, it gets here, but we've got a lot of work left to do here before we get to the game.

That's the nice thing about having seniors. I think our kids know that after going through it a year ago. To open with this type of game when you have a lot of upperclassmen and all that, it makes it easier. You'd still like to have a game to get under your belt to see what some of the younger kids and some of those kids can do. That's what we don't have.

Q. To that point, it seems with all the hype this game is receiving just given that it's the No. 2 team in the country, talking to the players all through camp it seems that the guys really haven't got caught up in that hype. Are you seeing that, just the way they're --
TRACY CLAEYS: They've still worked hard, the upperclassmen have, and it's a challenge, and they know that, that they're going to have to play well. But they've put in the time and the effort, and I think, like I say, they have some confidence because of how well we played a year ago for the majority of the game. They're a confident group, but they've done a good job preparing. We've only worked on TCU about three days so far, so you know, they've still got four more days to clean some things up.

Q. Earlier you mentioned tackling. Can you touch on preparing for Trevone Boykin, containing him?
TRACY CLAEYS: You know, the way the rules are nowadays, it is what it is. We don't get to hit the quarterback live or do any of that in practice, so however it goes on game day, it goes. You just don't tackle quarterbacks. You hardly tackle at all anymore in practice, and so we've got some kids that will show that they can tackle in the pass in open space, and we only tackled twice during -- but that's what everybody does nowadays. I wish I had an answer for you, but I don't. We're both going to find that out.

Q. You mentioned working specifically on TCU for like three or four days so far. Can you just kind of explain that again because most of camp you're looking at your own personnel and stuff and just in terms of drilling down on --
TRACY CLAEYS: Well, the first part of camp everybody has base calls, and then the second part of camp, what we changed is we took about seven or eight practices, we worked Colorado State stuff because they've got a change of staff. We've got to go out there and play. We really don't know what they're going to do. So we spent about seven practices working more of what we think we're going to see out of Colorado State, which is similar from some things that our offense is going to do, I believe.

And then after that, so after those, I don't know, 14, 15 days, then we worked our way into TCU with the thought being hopefully now we'll spend 10 days on TCU, and then we go back to play Colorado State, hopefully there's a little bit of recollection there, you know, on what we worked on. By doing it that way, it allowed us -- we're going to spend a good 10 days on them as I'm sure they'll do on us. Except for new stuff you haven't seen, there's no reason not to know what you're doing.

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